Locust

Why it earns its tonnage

Twenty tons does not buy you very much, so the question is what you spend it on, and Bergan answered that in 2499 by spending almost all of it on the engine. The LTV 160 gets a cruising speed of about 86 kilometres an hour and a top end near 130, and at the time that was enough to outrun most things it would meet.

Everything else is what was left over. A single Martell medium laser, mounted in a chin turret so it can actually point at things without the whole machine turning. Two Sperry Brownings on the flanks, sharing one two hundred round magazine between them, and they are there for exactly one reason: infantry go for the legs on something this size, and machine guns discourage that.

Then four tons of StarSlab and that is the budget gone.

The thing that catches people out is the hands, or rather the absence of them. A Locust has no hand actuators. It is on the quirk list as minimal arms and it means that in a physical fight you have nothing. Something walks into you and punches, and all you can do is be somewhere else next turn. Which, to be fair, is the plan.

Six centuries of being everywhere

The economics are the history here. Bergan ran Locusts out of eight factories through the Star League era and supplied the League and its member states right up to the Amaris Civil War. During the Succession Wars the number of plants went up rather than down, to nearly a dozen, Periphery ones included.

That did something unusual. Because so many places built them, the price stayed low and the parts stayed available, and the result is that everybody ended up with Locusts. Pirates could afford them. Corporate defence forces bought them in numbers. Periphery plants were largely limited to the original 1V, so that is what they built, over and over, for centuries.

When the Successor States started rebuilding old designs with recovered technology, the Locust got its share. The Capellans converted the Ares facility to build the 1L with a triple-strength myomer that, and this is the detail I enjoy, would not catch fire. Which tells you something about the versions that came before it.

The Word of Blake wanted their own, and went to Corean Enterprises to have it built. Corean had misgivings, so Blake agreed to buy the entire first production run up front to settle them. That is how the 5M happened, and every Level III unit ended up with at least one.

And then the part that should be sad and somehow is not. None of the Great Houses were much interested in keeping the line going. The Periphery, which had always relied on it, carried on building and upgrading Locusts on its own, and they are still turning them out into the thirty-second century. One of the most common machines ever built, kept alive by the people everyone else looks down on.

How these are rated

Every verdict below is against other Locusts available in the same era, not against the rest of the game. On twenty tons the margins are small and the choices are stark, which makes the ranking more useful here than on a heavy.

Only the Trap tier is calculated. It is worked out from the variant data rather than decided by me, which means it is falsifiable: to argue with it you only have to name something the cheaper machine gives up. The other three are my opinion and you should treat them that way. 2 of the 24 Locust variants fail the Trap test. The full rating scale is here, including what it deliberately does not measure.

The variants worth arguing about

All 24 are in the table further down. These are the ones that change how the machine plays.

On the table

Piloting one. Speed is your armour. Every turn you spend not moving at full pace is a turn you are just a small target with thin plate. Get behind things. Rear armour is where a medium laser actually matters, and you are one of the few machines that can reliably get there. Do not trade shots with anything. You will lose, and it will not be close.

Fighting one. Do not chase it, because you will not catch it and you will disorder your own line trying. Make it come to you, or ignore it and accept that it is spotting for somebody. If it does get close, punch it. It has no hands and it has weak legs on the quirk list, and physical attacks are how Locusts actually die.

What I see go wrong. People play them like small heavies and try to contribute damage. That is not the job. The job is information, rear arcs, and being somewhere inconvenient. And people forget three of them together are a completely different proposition to one on its own.

Against OpFor Command

If you run solo games with our AI opponent, the Locust is the clearest example on the site of role tags mattering more than the chassis name. 14 of the 24 variants are tagged Scout and 7 are Strikers, and the engine drives those very differently.

• Scout fits, including the LCT-1V itself, get the most negative aggression weighting in the engine. They will not close. They will hang about at the edge of the fight being annoying, which is exactly right.
• Striker fits like the LCT-5V and LCT-6M get a positive modifier and will actually commit, usually to something already hurt.
• The LCT-7V2 is the only one tagged Sniper, and the two missile boats, the LCT-1M and LCT-3D, sit at the back and throw LRMs.

Worth knowing because an enemy lance with three Scout Locusts plays nothing like one with three Strikers, and the two groups overlap heavily on Battle Value.

All 24 variants

Damage figures are the Alpha Strike short, medium and long values. BV is Battle Value 2.0.

Where and when you can field it

Availability for the LCT-1V by era, straight off the Master Unit List. It appears in all 11 of them, which almost nothing does.

The rest of the Locust family

Other machines that do the same job

Take it to the table

Common questions

Stats on this page are generated directly from our variant database, which is reconciled against the Master Unit List for Battle Value, introduction dates and per-era faction availability. Alpha Strike damage values are the standard card figures. If you spot something wrong, tell me and I will fix it.